Joe Deal

Joe Deal was a well known landscape photographer for many years. He recently passed away in 2010 at only 62 years of age. He was born in Topeka, Kansas in 1947, but was actually raised in Missouri and later in Minnesota. After high school, Deal was accepted to the Kansas City Art Institute. After obtaining his degree, he took work as a janitor in a museum of photography in New York. Much later he received a masters in fine art from New Mexico University. He had a passion for teaching, and worked at the University of California, Washington University, and Rhode Island School of Design.

Deal had a fascination with making photographs portraying man’s impact on the world. In 1970 he made his big break when 18 of his photos were shown at an exhibition by William Jenkins at the Eastman House’s International Museum of photography. Deal was different in that he broke away from the “romantic” landscape made immortal by Ansell Adams. He was more concerned with the sometimes ugly and contrasting mark humans make on the world around us. He was fascinated with the once untouched west, and how development had changed the pristine landscapes. He approached his work in a very different manner than most photographers. He was scientific, rather than artistic, and this approach is what set him apart as something new and different. Deal was very against the idea of “personal intrusion.” He wanted to document the environment, rather than leave his own mark or interpretation in his image. Some of his most famous work was titled “The Fault Zone.” He furthered his concept by adding geologic impacts along with humans on the landscape.

One critic described his work as
“jaundice, and dry-eyed inspection.”

Another Raves
“They were photographing landscapes, but they weren't after beauty in the
classical sense; they were fine-art documentarians, capturing how man had
altered the American landscape. That genre of photography, for artists like
Deal, was no longer about the sublimity of nature; it was about the
intersection of civilization and wilderness. Not mountains, but suburban
sprawl.”

Personally, I think his work is very interesting and at the time very different. In my mind he bridged the gap between documentary photography and fine art work. While he says his work is an exact representation of the land he see’s, it still has its own personality. I think the strongest aspect of his work is the obvious attention to composition. I think despite his own remarks about leaving his bias aside, he still tells a story in the way he frames his photographs.